The National:

This is from a newsletter from Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp, called Reinventing Scotland. It explores the wellbeing economy. Sign up here to receive it every Tuesday at 7pm. 

POLITICALLY, the Western world is moving to the right and that’s an accelerating trend.

Far-right gains in the EU elections – such as in France – made headlines but the majority of seats in Brussels and the largest gains fell to the centre-right. However, it's the far-right’s dog-whistle politics, amplified by the dominant right-wing media, that’s moving the political spectrum rightward.

The Overton Window

This is the spectrum of political ideas that are politically acceptable to the public at any given moment. Most seem to think politics swings from left to right and back again on a fixed spectrum but it doesn't. Left and right are relative to the movement of the spectrum as a whole and for the past 20 years in particular, it has been accelerating rightward.

This isn't a new phenomenon. Many are surprised to hear that Scotland voted Conservative in 1955 but 1950s conservatism does not equate to modern conservatism. Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan all continued groundbreaking policies started by the UK’s only ever socialist prime minister, Clement Attlee (below), whose Labour government (1945-1951) created the NHS, nationalised major industries and massively improved social services. Back then the conservatives were considerably to the left of modern Labour because the whole spectrum has moved right since then.

Labour winning the next General Election will speed up that rightward momentum because Keir Starmer’s Labour are significantly to the right of any past Labour party – including Tony Blair’s “New Labour”, which John Major claimed was to the right of his outgoing government.

Starmer’s wholesale adoption of populist conservative policies moves the whole political spectrum to the right. Policies previously classified as far-right move closer to the centre, becoming more acceptable, and ideas that used to be called centre-left are labelled far-left and the old far-left drops off the acceptable spectrum altogether. New and even more radical right-wing ideas enter the spectrum as the new far-right, giving respectability to the old far-right which now seems almost reasonably centralist.

Why the slow drift right accelerated…

The process of right-wing drift in Western politics was initially so slow that it went unnoticed. Politics had become so predictable, all polling indicated that majority governments came from the centre of politics, wherever the centre was. So the political elites gravitated to the centre. Their true beliefs were watered down and you couldn’t tell the difference between Conservatives and New Labour.

However, the 2008 crash was a tipping point. Unlike previous recessions, the majority of the population felt the impact, through the resultant austerity. The sheer shock of the size of the government intervention to bail out the banks and inability in the following years of the centralist elites to provide answers meant the population were now willing to abandon the centre for the far-left and far-right.

A new breed of right-wing political mavericks arose such as Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson (above), and even Tommy Robinson had his time in the spotlight. The left went for old-hands Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and Bernie Sanders in the US but their own party machines acted against them. The right had the money and controlled the media so it wasn't a fair fight.

A different kind of Project Fear!

Less immigration has always been a clarion call of the right, especially now with a new influx of refugees from the Middle East and Africa, much of which can be attributed to failed Western foreign policy.

The old complaint was that “immigrants take our jobs” but with unemployment low, the right now pushes the dangers of cultural diversity eroding national identities and traditions to create culture anxiety – British nationalism and racism. Another effective message is that there is now a difference between “Us, the ordinary people” and those “corrupt corporate and political elite”. OK, so we’ll give them that one. Dog-whistle politics work best when there is an element of “truth”.

(Image: PA)

Add the echo chamber of social media into the mix – reinforcing niche beliefs via algorithms that share only content from people who agree with them, meaning ignorance finds social reinforcement as EVERYONE seems to agree with you.

These highly interconnected factors have driven the Overton Window to the right, throughout the West. The impact on the political landscape has been severe, as with Brexit, but that’s just a single symptom of the downward spiral into the neoliberal, oligarchical, dystopian economic future that we are currently locked into.

So where does the wellbeing approach fit in?

The great irony is that the rightwards movement of the political spectrum has opened the door to defeat the right. The political and socio-economic system we live under no longer matches the core beliefs, values, hopes or aspirations of the people. The spectrum has moved through media manipulation but the core values of the people have not.

Voters sense that and many are abandoning politics but out of that frustration a new set of values is emerging. The idea of a society based on wellbeing, of finding balance between the social, economic and environmental wellbeing of a nation. Eventually an unbridgeable chasm will open between our values and our politics and allow us to refocus society on that higher purpose.

The incoming “New Labour” neoliberal Government will prove that there is no alternative to neoliberalism on offer from Westminster and that might well be the tipping point. They say it's often darkest before the dawn.

Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp is the CEO of Business for Scotland, the chief economist at the wellbeing economics think tank Scotianomics, the founder of the Believe in Scotland campaign and the author of Scotland the Brief.